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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

"neurodiversity" is another case of hyper-pathologization . Everyone has quirks. Moreover, its enabling antisocial behavior. If someone is impolite we call them "on the spectrum" and accept it.

Not everything is a disease. Human behavior is very diverse and there's a broad spectrum of perfectly normal individuals.

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The "broad spectrum" idea is precisely what people are trying to communicate by using the term "neurodiversity". The alternative perspective, which used to be very common in my circles (and frankly is poking through a bit in your sentence about impoliteness), is that human behavior is not diverse and "normal" refers to a narrow, universal standard of behavior that everyone knows and is obligated to follow. A decade or two ago, I would constantly hear people complaining about others who don't listen to "normal" music or have "normal" hobbies.

Have you ever considered that to an autistic person, a neurotypicsl person might be the impolite one?

People who are actually antisocial will be impolite on purpose, and it's usually pretty obvious. Meanwhile, actually autistic people will get labelled as jerks or whatever because everyone assumes that the "rudeness" is intentional even if they just miss some cue or happen to be too distracted to respond in an "appropriate" manner.

You're right. Autism isn't a disease and its traits should be normalized and treated as normal human social diversity. We should proooobably stop that whole dog-training-but-worse thing called ABA.

That is pretty much counter to whole realization of neurodiversity but ok

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